You heard about using upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters in your password. You also heard about the ever-changing minimum password length. Researches now say you should use passphrases over random characters.
Here, I’ll give you yet another choice which will be virtually impossible to crack.
But first, let’s go for a simple generator. Every linux distro has openssl, which is capable of generating secure password. Simply run the following command, which according to some password strength test, takes 1 hundred trillion years to crack
openssl rand -base64 32That gives you 45 random characters including some symbols, which is an excellent password. Now, if you want something even stronger, you can install keepassxc and use its password generator which supports extended ASCII characters. Standard ASCII contains 128 characters. Extended ASCII contains the standard ASCII characters plus another 128 characters. Run the following command to generate a password. According to the same web site, it will take 9 trillion trillion trillion trillion years (9×1034 times longer) to crack.
keepassxc-cli generate -lUne -c+. -L32 --every-groupAny sane person will not try to remember the password and even if one manages to do so, he or she will not be able to type it. Writing it down is also quite difficult. This kind of forces the user to use a password manager.
Use of extended ASCII characters will strengthen your passwords substantially. Typically brute-force password attacks stick with standard ASCII as it would slow them down exponentially otherwise.
